Thursday, January 6, 2011

My Favorite Place to Farm Savage Leather

Normally, I'm not a huge fan of farming. It certainly has it's uses and it's advantages, but I generally find it repetitive and tedious, and just not for me. But there is one type of farming I tend to enjoy, and that's leather farming. Why? Because you get to kill stuff. Who doesn't enjoy slaughtering hundreds of helpless little creatures and then adding insult to injury by tearing the skin off their backs? (Ok, that got a bit sadistic, I apologize.) Back when I started playing WoW, my main was a rogue with Leatherworking and Skinning, and I made most of my money through skinning. Before I leveled my shaman and learned the joys of Jewelcrafting, I made a modest amount of money farming the Shoveltusks outside of New Agamand in Howling Fjord. Except for the occasional bull, they were all passive and traveled in groups of 4-5, so I would stealth into a pack, and AoE them down with Fan of Knives. Although they mostly dropped scraps, I found farming there to be preferable to places like Stormpeaks for a few reasons. One, like I mentioned, was that they and the majority of the mobs in the area were passive, so I didn't have to worry about drawing unwanted aggro. Two, they had low health and traveled in packs, so it was very easy for me to AoE a bunch of them at a time. And three, they dropped good vendor trash, the occasional green, and Rhino Meat and Chilled Meat which I could sell on the AH, or cook and sell. Like I said before, I usually don't farm anymore, but Cold's blog is wonderful and I wanted to contribute to the carnival. So I decided to bite the bullet and give farming another shot, and hopefully find a place with qualities similat to my LK farming spots.

Like many others, I did farm at the beginning of Cata. I had mining and herbalism on my pally, and farmed up a mess of herbs and ore while listening to lectures as I prepared for exams. Once exams were over, however, I dropped herbalism for Alchemy to work with my Jewelcrafting and haven't really farmed since. If anyone's curious, Twilight Highlands is awesome for Elementium Ore and Pyrite Ore, and the river in Uldum is great for Whiptail. But I'm sure people already know this, or other bloggers will mention it in more detail, so I wanted to go a different route and see if I could find a new and good place for leather now that the Stone Bats have been nerffed. I had always had a hunch that Vashj'ir would be a decent place for farming, and I think to some degree I'm right. So without further ado, here is my "favorite" (or rather, only at the moment) place to farm Savage Leather.

The starting area in Vashj'ir is home to Splitclaw Skitterers, and there are tons of them. They only have about 31k health, so they are quite easy to take down. They're also passive, so you don't have to worry about drawing aggro from a bunch of them. But best of all, they have a blazing fast respawn time. There were multiple times when, right as I had finished killing one, another would spawn in the same place. I spent exactly an hour farming them, and you can see the results of that session above. Right now, there are very few people questing in this area so you won't have much competition either. The crabs are needed for a quest, but people aren't going to hang around and you can just skin them when they're done! You can stick to the starting area for your faction, but if you're brave (or on a PvE server), you can wander over to the other side's area for more. I found the Alliance side had more of the crabs, so I tended to stay there. I would deplete one area, switch to the other, deplete it, and move back. They are so abundant, you can find one by hitting "Tab" as soon as you've finished skinning your kill nine times out of ten, and you rarely have to move more than ~20 yards to find another one. I think I averaged one kill every twenty seconds, judging from my Recuperate timer. Yet another reason why this area is great is because of your movement speed on the ground. I could be wrong, but I'm quite certain that you move faster with the buff here than you do on dry land. This makes it excellent for melee to sprint from one kill to the next. Add in a Potion of Treasure Finding for extra fun!

So that's why it's great in theory, but is it great in practice? At my server prices, I stand to make ~1.5k just from auctioning off what I got from looting, skinning, and the Tiny Treasure Chests from the potion. I also made about 120g from vendor items and the gold in the chests. Not bad for just an hour's work. However, you could probably make even more if you cook. The crabs drop Monstrous Claw very frequently (wowhead says 50% of the time, but it seemed closer to 90% for me) and just one of these and nothing else makes Seasoned Crab, excellent buff food for anyone needing more hit. Skinning also gives you a chance to find a Strange Bloated Stomach which contains a random Volatile or two.

This is the only place I've really tested for farming leather, so I have no idea if there are better places. I'm sure there are, but I have a feeling this will be a great place for a skinning alt to farm, or anyone who's just getting back and needs some extra gold. My rogue is still only level 80, but she had no problem blasting through these crabs. Fast ground movement, awesome respawn, and little to no competition makes this a great place to farm up some leather.

My next toon to push from 80 to 85 is a skinner/leatherworker. I have not been to Vasj'ir on any of my other toons for a variety of reasons but I had decided long ago I will take this druid through that content. Lots of posts so far have talked about herbs and ore in this zone so I was beginning to think I had made an error by not sending my herbalist or miner through Vasj'ir--but now I feel better.